It was evening when I landed. There was a mist in the river. A drizzling rain was falling. Appropriate weather with which to bid us welcome home. The lights of London gleamed dimly through the fog and wet. So soon as I had set foot on land I saw, coming at me through the uncertain light, the individual who, as he stood with his friends upon that moonlit shore, had cursed us for bearing the Great Joss to the ship across the motionless waters of the Gulf of Tongking.
Since that night we had ourselves anathematised someone else for serving us as we had served him.
I had only seen him once, and then from some little distance in the moonshine, but there was no possibility of mistaken identity. This was the man. He was dressed in the same fantastic garb, and came at me like a ghost out of shadowland. He took me by the shoulders, and he cried—as he had done upon that moon-kissed shore:—
“The Great Joss! The Great Joss! Give us back the Great Joss!”
Exactly what took place I cannot say. I was so taken aback by the unexpectedness of the encounter—having never dreamed that I should set eyes upon the man again—that, for some moments, sheer surprise robbed me of my faculties. Before I was myself again, the man had gone. Others had thrust him from me. Although I rushed here and there among the people who stood about I could not find him. He had vanished.
I had swallowed a good many bitter pills since last I left that wharf—the bitterest was still to come. I had to pay my visit to the owners. On the night of my arrival it was too late to see them. The pleasure was postponed to the morning. It was a pleasure!
I came out from their presence a disgraced man. Which was no more than I had expected, though it was no easier to bear on that account. The blame was wholly mine. So they would have it. For some of the language which they used to me I found it hard to keep my hands from off them. My tale of the Great Joss, and of all that I had hoped to gain for them by that adventure, they received with something more than incredulity. If the thing had resulted as I had hoped, that they would have pocketed their share of the spoils, and betrayed no scruples, I knew them too well to doubt. But because, as I held, through no fault of mine, the affair had miscarried, there was no epithet too opprobrious for them to bestow on me. By their showing I had been guilty of all sorts of crimes of which I had never heard. I had betrayed their trust; smirched their good name—as if in the eyes of those who knew them it could be smirched; been guilty of piracy; acted like a common thief; offended against the law of nations; brought shame on England’s mercantile marine.
Oh, it was grand to hear them talking! They might have been saints from whose brows I had plucked the halos. They were good enough to explain that it was only because they disbelieved my entire story, and placed no credence in any part of it whatever, that they refrained from handing me over to the properly constituted authorities, to be by them passed on to the Chinese Government, to be dealt with as my offences merited. They took me for a jay. And were so kind as to add that they looked upon the tale as a clumsy, dishonest, and disingenuous attempt to draw a red herring across their track—the phrase was theirs!—and so prevented them from taking proper and adequate notice of the scandalous neglect of duty, and of their interests, of which, to my lasting shame, I had been guilty.
It was a rare wigging that I had. And, to the best of their ability, they included in it everyone who had been with me on board The Flying Scud. There were four of us, at least, who swore that we’d be even for it with someone somehow. Isaac Rudd, Sam Holley, his chum, Bill Cox, and I; we were the four.
And all we had to go upon, to help us towards getting even, was a scrap of paper. Half a sheet of common note.